Installing Drupal

I'm trying to install drupal after a few years of not having used it.

I followed the somewhat cryptic install guidance at https://www.drupal.org/docs/user_guide/en/install-composer.html , managed to coax composer into life and to instal drush, and now drush crashes with a fatal error every time I try to do anything.

I search the internet for a solution, and now I've broken my SSH access to my server.

My problem is I can't get Drupal 8 loaded on my local machine. All these so called easy installation routes all seem to throw an error of some kind. I've read even dev desktop has an exception for Windows 10. Currently trying Mamp and almost got to heaven(after all night and day) when this message came up.

"The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.

Hello,

I am trying to import the config from another of my Drupal 9.1.4 projects with Composer / Drush (drush config-import from a folder source, all two websites on my local repository on Xampp), but a guzzlehttp/guzzle error is thrown in the middle of the process, whatever I try...

One of my sites has out-grown bluehost so I wanted to try out Amazon's AWS, starting with Lightsail.   The default templates make it easy to set up a legacy architecture with Maria.  I want to user composer-recommended as that is how my site is currently designed.  I've almost been able to install a site except for the mysql connection.  I created a LAMP instance and installed the basic Drupal site code with composer. I have not been able to link a database to the install, however.

I've upgraded a site from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. I did it manually, not using composer. So I downloaded the zip core tarball, and then installed modules manually (the old way, by downloading and extracting modules in modules/contrib and enabling them in "Extend" in the admin of the site). The site is working perfectly. The "status report" shows no errors and just one non-relevant warning. I seem to have read that composer was the recommended way but the old procedure could still be used.

I am using  mssql to connect with drupal but I get an error saying

• In your ./sites/default/settings.php file you have configured Drupal to use a sqlsrv server, however your PHP installation currently does not support this database type.